September 22, 2014

"For most of human history, as Amy Farrell, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Dickinson College, notes in 'Fat Shame,' only the wealthy could have extra fat on their bodies. Most people worked too hard, had too little food, and were often too sick. Then came the Industrial Revolution: mass food production and more sedentary jobs meant that the new middle class, and not just the wealthy, became heavier. Once 'average' fat people came on the scene, Farrell writes, 'fat denigration' became more common: fat jokes proliferated in nineteenth-century magazines."

I've always used the word "fat" as my tag on this blog, "fat" and "thinness." They're parallel words, and there's no reason why one straightforward, factual descriptive embodies more shame or disapproval than the other. Euphemisms imply the need for one.

9 comments:

The theory of the leisure class. It takes a certain amount of leisure and money to remain lean and fit past your fortieth birthday......Tans used to be working class markers. Then, as working people moved indoors, they became an ornamental finish. Your skin as expensive, hand rubbed leather.. I suppose, what with tanning salons, skin cancer, and John Boehner, they're going out of style again........Follow the money. When sugar was first introduced into western culture and was an expensive substance, bad teeth were a sign of wealth and were considered fashionable.

"For most of human history, as Amy Farrell, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Dickinson College, notes in 'Fat Shame,' only the wealthy could have extra fat on their bodies. Most people worked too hard, had too little food, and were often too sick. Then came the Industrial Revolution: mass food production and more sedentary jobs meant that the new middle class, and not just the wealthy, became heavier. Once 'average' fat people came on the scene, Farrell writes, 'fat denigration' became more common: fat jokes proliferated in nineteenth-century magazines."

America is and has been the richest country on earth for over one hundred years in terms of purchasing per capita and even with that the ability for almost every American to be fat is at best has only occurred in within the last sixty years. Maybe even less. That the USA and other advanced economies even have this problem at all shouldn't be a cause to shame and blame but rather a reason to celebrate what up to now two hundred millennia of human history had not been able to accomplish.

I don't buy this theory. Prince Hal made fun of Falstaff in Shakespeare's plays, calling him "Old Tun-belly," well before the Industrial Revolution. Maybe fewer people were fat, but mocking them for it was popular.

The Grafton, Massachusetts town common has a statue of American inventor Jerome Wheelock (1834-1902). His estate paid for it, so I assume it is supposed to show him in a positive light. His belt is not small. (Though like MayBee's high school friend, "[n]ow []he'd barely register as anything other than normalish.")